A three-book handbook of theological sentences for the clergy
The Sentences — in Latin Sententiae, also transmitted as Sententiarum libri tres, “three books of sentences” — is a theological work by Isidore, bishop of Seville, compiled in the early seventh century, within the years usually given as 604 to 633. It is not a continuous treatise but a gathering of short statements: the Latin word sententia means a maxim or quoted judgement, and Isidore’s book strings such passages together into an ordered whole. Its stated purpose was practical. The collection was assembled as a manual for the clergy, a working reference of sound doctrine rather than an original work of speculation.
A Handbook Assembled from Gregory and Augustine
The bulk of the material is drawn from two authorities above all: Gregory the Great and Augustine of Hippo. Isidore’s role was that of a compiler and arranger, selecting, excerpting, and ordering passages from the Fathers so that a cleric could find the Church’s teaching on a given point without possessing, or reading through, the whole patristic library.
The form he used was already familiar. The genre of sententiae was well established by the time Isidore wrote, and his collection belongs to the earliest stages of its development as a coherent body of theology rather than a loose anthology of maxims. In this respect the Sentences is counted among the first systematic treatments of Christian theology — an attempt to set out the substance of the faith in an orderly sequence of topics.
From the Unchanging God to the Judgment of God
The work opens with the being of God, treated as supreme and unchangeable. From that starting point it ranges across a broad programme of Christian doctrine, taking in the creation of the world, the nature of evil, the ordering of the Church’s ministries, and the final judgment. These four subjects — creation, evil, ecclesiastical orders, and the judgment of God — are the ones singled out as representative of the book’s scope, and together they show its character: it moves between speculative questions about God and the world, practical questions about the structure of the clergy, and the expected end of all things. The concern throughout is with what a cleric needed to know and to hand on, not with resolving disputed questions in the manner of a later scholastic summa.
Three Books, Each with Its Chapters
Isidore divided the material into three parts, or books, and each book was further broken down into numbered chapters. The chapters were signalled in advance: a manuscript fragment preserving the close of the second book and the start of the third shows the second book ending, a heading for the third book’s capitulation following, then a numbered list of fifty-six chapter titles before the text of the third book itself begins. This apparatus of chapter lists gave readers a way to navigate the collection and to locate a topic quickly, and it is part of why the work could function as a reference book.
Five Hundred Manuscripts and a Modern Translation
The Sentences survives in an unusually large number of copies: roughly five hundred manuscripts are recorded in the reference inventories of Latin works. That figure is the more striking because the Sentences was never as widely reproduced as Isidore’s Etymologies — copies of it are notably rarer than copies of that encyclopedic work, and early manuscripts of it seldom come onto the market. Its circulation was nonetheless long and wide, including within Spain itself, where twelfth-century copies were still being made.
The text also circulated under the title De summo bono, “On the Highest Good,” and it was among the Isidorean works put into print in the incunable period at Nuremberg. Modern study rests on the critical edition prepared by P. Cazier for the Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (volume 111), which is based on thirty-one manuscripts. An English translation by Thomas L. Knoebel, presenting the three books of the Sentences, has been described as the first rendering of the complete work into English — a late arrival for a book that shaped the Latin West’s basic theological instruction for centuries.
The sentence genre emerged from works like Prosper of Aquitaine’s Sententia, a collection of maxims by Augustine of Hippo.
Isidore’s Latin name is given as Isidorus Hispalensis, and his dates as c. 560–4 April 636. He is described as a Hispano-Roman scholar, theologian, and archbishop; Charles Forbes René de Montalembert called him “the last scholar of the ancient world.” At a time of disintegration of classical culture, aristocratic violence, and widespread illiteracy, Isidore was involved in the conversion of the Arian Visigothic kings to Catholicism, assisting his brother Leander of Seville and continuing after Leander’s death. He was influential in the inner circle of Sisebut, Visigothic king of Hispania, and, like Leander, played a prominent role in the Councils of Toledo.
Manuscripts and a Tenth-Century Bifolium
The Free Library of Philadelphia’s Lewis E 137 is described as a copy of the Sententiarum of St. Isidore, one of the Doctors of the Church.
A separate witness is a decorated vellum bifolium from Italy, second half of the 10th century, written in Caroline minuscule, with red numerals and rubrics—partly in rustic capitals and partly accented with green—and two red initials also with green. Its text is continuous from Book II, 44.4a, to Book III, 1.2, and it was the central bifolium of a quire. It was bought from Bernard Quaritch Ltd. in June 2005 by the Böhlen Collection, Bern, MS 905. The Schoenberg Database records that no copy earlier than 1200 had been sold since 1930.
Print and Translation Details
The printer of the incunable is given as J. Sensenschmidt, with a date around 1470. The Cazier edition was published in Turnhout by Brepols in 1998. Thomas L. Knoebel’s translation is listed as a 272-page online resource published in Mahwah, New Jersey, by Paulist Press in 2018, with distribution in London by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) in 2025. The catalogue summary identifies Isidore as the last Latin father of the church.
